Lessons From Basketball for the Church

Clayton King writes in his blog that the church and the Boston Celtics basketball team have some things in common. Once this team had the respect of all basketball fans. Then they had 6 losing seasons out of 9. The coach made great changes throughout the team ...he changed up everything.

The church has lost its favor among the majority of Americans. Many of us, according to Clayton, want to find a way back to the glory days. He feels this is like the Celtics when they kept doing things the same way and losing.

To summarize Clayton's points on how the Celtics started winning and what that could mean to the church I leave these 4 points:

1. Embrace change; not living on legacy


2. Stay hungry, not fat and content (As soon as the church becomes apathetic, it becomes nostalgic and it begins to die. Soon it rots until it is nothing but a monument to the past. But when the church stays hungry for souls, for serving others, for making disciples that will change the world, the church CANNOT BE STOPPED! Reality Check: Followers always reflect their leaders.)
   
3. Stay faithful...don't get flashy (Faithfulness is blessed when it revolves around Christ and His mission to redeem the world, not our attempts to be successful, cool, or relevant.)


4. Keep it simple (When the church gets subverted into anything other than the gospel, discipleship and community, we move away from our simple mission of being the presence of Christ to the world around us. Politics, the environment, and boycotting theme parks are all noble things in themselves, but in the words of Leonard Sweet, the church chases after causes and mission statements because we don’t like the one that was given to us by Jesus. "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Make disciples and teach them to obey me." Simple enough to keep us all pretty busy.)

Jesus laid out the simple, but insurmountable task: make disciples surrendered totally to the Kingdom of God with Jesus Christ as King of all. We have no room for:

• change resistance
• complacency
• compromise
• complications

I'm no basketball fan, but I love what Clayton has written with regards to the church. He concludes this blog post with: "Thank you, Boston Celtics, for making this 35 year old basketball lover feel like a kid again. But mostly, thank you for reminding me how fierce, relentless, and effective the church CAN be if we know who we are and what our mission is."

Clayton, I never played the hoops, but I was one enthusiastic high jumping screaming cheerleader. So for you, man..."Yeah!!! Clayton's scores for our team. YEAH!!!"

WEBSITE FOR THE POST MENTIONED:

http://claytonking.com/what-the-church-can-learn-from-the-boston-celtics/